The cleaning of paint roller covers manually is slow, messy and ineffective as well as being extremely wasteful of water. Many sites do not have a pressurised water supply and disposal of waste water is often also strictly regulated.
A number of paint roller cover cleaning devices have been proposed. Whilst some are more effective at cleaning paint roller covers than manual cleaning they all tend to be very wasteful of water, typically requiring between 20 to 300 litres of water to effectively clean a roller cover. They typically require a pressurised mains water source, which is often not available at a site to be painted. Mains water supplies whilst sometime referred to as “high pressure” supplies are typically well below 150 psi and so a substantial amount of water is required to properly clean a roller cover. This results in a substantial amount of waste water being produced (typically between 20 and 300 litres) so that it becomes impractical to contain the volume of waste water produced and transport it off site. The large volume of waste water also becomes very expensive to recycle as the coagulant cost is based on water volume. The low pressure of mains water supplies can also make it impractical to properly clean roller covers in some cases. Some devices require the removal of a roller cover from its handle, which is a messy process. Others require manual operation which can affect cleaning performance and is inconvenient.
It is an object of the invention to provide a paint roller cover cleaner that overcomes at least some of these problems or to at least provides the public with a useful choice.